Legacy
by thelittletree
Summary: Based, yet again, on the Vincent-Tifa universe of my other fics. Many years have passed. And someone comes looking for Mr. Valentine, bearing a letter.


Disclaimer: Don't own Final Fantasy VII, or Vincent, or Tifa, or Junon, or Nibelheim, or...well, you get the picture. Just inserting them into the machine of my imagination and watching what pops out.

Legacy

by: thelittletree

(Okay, I hope I'm not taking too much liberty with this one. A lot further from the game than anything I've written yet. But, in following with my spite for loose ends, I've written a little thing to explain how Vincent's life might be if we fast-forwarded a few years. Based, of course, on my Vin-Tifa universe.)

_And then I see you there  
__With your arms open wide and you try to embrace me  
These lonely tears I cry  
They keep me in chains and I wish they'd release me  
Cold is the night but  
Colder still is the heart made of stone turned from clay  
And if you follow me  
You'll see all the black, all the white, fade to grey_

-_Fade to Grey_, by Jars of Clay

* * *

"Hello?"

The man didn't stop or turn to her before heading up the stairs. She thought the disregard was probably just about involuntary, he was so used to the idea of being all but invisible.

"Excuse me, Mr. Valentine?"

That got his attention. He jerked around a little to glance behind him, and she saw the sudden recognition in his eyes. A kind of vulnerable surprise, unprepared for what might've been a stab to the heart. It lasted only a second, however, before he swallowed it down behind a kind of imperturbable mask. She didn't mind, though. She'd been expecting that.

"Yes?"

She tried to smile at him, wanting to put him at ease if only to assuage the guilt behind her determination to raise some ghosts. "Hi, my name is Trina Goldham." She paused a moment, unsure now about the necessity of going on. "Trina Lockhart Goldham."

His eyes brushed her briefly, though she was fairly convinced it was no surprise to him anymore. Maybe it was the hair, or the eyes, or maybe even the voice that had given her away. She didn't need to be told again how much she resembled her great-grandmother.

"You..." She had to force herself from picking at her nails. "You look exactly like I expected."

He didn't look that much older than her. His black hair was uncut and uneven through something close to neglect; he wore a dark, dusty coat over dark, unremarkable clothing; his eyes were reddish; he had great metabolism; and, of course, there was the golden arm. She'd been waiting for almost an hour.

"I was told I could find you here." She gave a dry, clumsy chuckle, only realizing as she glanced at the small mail lockers to her left that she had yet to meet his eyes for more than a second. Half-afraid, she realized, to see that look on his face again - the terrible revelation of both his loneliness and loss. "But I didn't know your work schedule."

He didn't reply. That wasn't a surprise, she admitted, since she had so far given him no explanation for her presence. He was no longer looking at her, either, his eyes fixed at a point somewhere over the railing, toward the sun-bleached wallpaper of the tiny lobby. Just waiting, she had the impression; patiently waiting for either the salvation or damnation her appearance heralded.

"I, um..." This time she couldn't help picking at her nails. It wasn't something she usually did in situations like this - a small-time interest pieces reporter for the Old Junon paper, she was accustomed to speaking with strangers. But she'd thought about this for a long time - about finding him. Maybe her mother had been right in the end: it was better to leave him alone. If he'd wanted visitors, after all, he wouldn't have made himself so difficult to locate.

Right?

That wasn't what her great-grandmother had believed. But, so far, Trina was the only one who had seen the letter.

"I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes, Vincent." The name came out with difficulty. Everyone else referred to him as 'your great-grandfather'. A gift, she'd realized, her great-grandmother had tried to bestow since he was not biologically related to her. A gift of family, generation after generation, for however long he needed them.

He'd been there at the funeral, her mother had said. Not at the graveside, but watching from a distance. And that had been the last time any of them had seen him.

"How far have you come?"

The question surprised her, anticipating some kind of initial brush-off. She forced her hands into her pockets and intentionally lifted her head to meet those expertly dark, unreadable eyes. "I live in Old Junon, but I...I was in Nibelheim for another reason and just thought..." She trailed off and couldn't help dropping her gaze. It sounded like the lie it was. After a moment, however, she went doggedly on. "Just thought I would look you up."

A pause followed that made her very aware of her scuffed sneakers.

"Have you eaten?"

She looked up and, suddenly conscious of a growing blush, turned her attention back to the mailboxes. It wasn't quite five o'clock. She hadn't really counted on not finding him at home, but she'd seen a restaurant on the way. "Well, I..." It perturbed her somehow, the applied directness of his questions. Directly linked with her job choice, she thought wanly; she was too used to the social vagueness of the rest of the world. "No, I haven't, but I...I was planning to go...somewhere to eat when...when..." She choked on her bumbling and glanced up again.

She half-expected, with some dread, to see him looking down on her with a cold disdain for her awkwardness. It was an expression she could imagine on that face, in those shuttered eyes that fairly spoke of the cavernous age difference between them. A distancing, dismissing look that would knock away all hope of some kind of connection.

But there was no distance there. He was smiling, in fact - there was barest hint of softness to his mouth, the smallest touch of some modest warmth around his eyes. And this time when it faded, it was replaced with an impression of resigned forbearance.

He gave a negligent gesture of his hand as he turned, to beckon her if she would still come. She felt the fingers of nervous excitement clutch suffocatingly at her lungs as he continued up the stairs.

His apartment was small and spare: hardwood floors, long, curtainless windows; furniture pushed against the walls as if the couch, coffee table and chair were only there on the pretense of comfort. In the kitchen was a square dining table where yellowing newspapers and old, dirty mugs told her he spent most of his free time. Another closed door to their right presumably opened to the bedroom. She only spared it a glance before following his lead and sitting at the table.

He made a short-lived attempt to tidy up before settling into a convincing display of casual stillness. He even went so far as to meet her eyes. He was curious, she thought, and with the largest part of his guard down, as if the decision to let her through his door had also let her through a number of personal walls. It made her ashamed of her own nervous tension.

"Would you like something to eat or drink?"

She took a breath and tried to force her smile to look natural. "No, thank you. I'm fine."

His hands found each other on the table. Trina nearly bit her lip in the moment of silence that followed, her mind inevitably racing for all of those speeches she'd carefully composed over the years. But then he was speaking. Not as socially tactless as her mother had told her, she noted, and quickly began to revise her preconceptions about him. A little bit of a recluse, maybe, but certainly not an island.

"You must be twenty-four this year."

She blinked, surprised. "Yes, how do you know that?"

The smile around his eyes returned. "You were three months old when your great-grandmother died."

She felt her jaw twitch as a hundred wordless questions bloomed like images into her mind. Her father had left them, a wife and two daughters, when she'd been too young to remember much more than his face, the security of his arms, and snippets of day-to-day life. Her grandfather had died when she'd been ten. No uncles; no brothers. The idea that this man might've been watching her from afar - a faint, affirming presence who had accepted her into his home and who, perhaps, felt some paternal pride behind that smile - made her eyes unexpectedly prick with tears. Mortified, she began to blink them back, quickly bringing a hand up on the pretext of scratching her forehead.

But, no. She'd been living in Old Junon; he, in Nibelheim. He had no more idea about her life than she did of his. She swallowed, willing the lump in her throat away as viciously as she willed away the peculiar disappointment in her gut.

"I saw you in your mother's arms at the funeral."

She dropped her hand and wished suddenly for something to focus her restlessness on. "Um, actually, could I have something to drink?"

"Of course. Would you like some tea?"

A part of her was ready to sigh in relief. "That would be wonderful."

He stood from his chair and moved to the sink, one arm reaching for a well-used kettle on a burner. "Camomile?"

She might not have recognized the inflection in his voice if not for the years her grandfather had lived in their house. Subtly intoned, like he was laughing at himself, the way her grandfather had once said, "Having trouble?" when her mother had struggled to decipher his arthritic handwriting. She couldn't help but smile a little as she glanced at his back, idly picking at her nails.

"You can tell I'm nervous, huh?"

He set the kettle down on a burner and turned a dial on the stove. "I tend to have that effect on people." He opened a cupboard and brought down two clean mugs.

"Oh." A foreseeable hangup, she recognized. "Well, it's not you're fault. I'm just..." She made a gesture, as if trying to conjure the right words. "I'm just feeling a little off-balance. I'm not sure I expected you to be so..."

He turned his head as he opened a drawer at his hip, one eyebrow climbing gently.

"...approachable." She pursed her lips, mulling over the fact that the first word to come to mind had not been _approachable_, but _human_. Bitter against an ex-husband, she should have expected her mother to make the story into a simple moral about how men were monsters who abandoned their families.

"And that makes you nervous?"

"Well, I am a reporter," she told him with a small chuckle. "I'm used to having the rumors pan out."

She was still smiling when he turned to face her, and it was his expression that alerted her to the sudden rigid tension in his posture. She opened her mouth in dismayed confusion, but he spoke first.

"Please, leave." He wasn't looking at her, and he sounded tired.

"What?" She waited a moment for him to look up, to explain, anything. "Why? I don't understand ... "

"Just go, please. I'm not interested in media attention."

Some of her colleagues, the ones who worked the big scoops, had sometimes complained about how they were often treated like mosquitoes people wanted to swat away. She, however, had never felt the sting of the stigma attached to her job. Until now.

"I'm not here to interview you," she defended immediately, trying her best not to sputter in her indignation. It didn't help that a part of her wouldn't have been adverse to writing a piece about one of the presumably long-dead members of Avalanche. "I just came to meet you. My grandfather had so many stories about you from his childhood, and you were a part of my mother's life until she moved to Old Junon. I just...I wanted..."

He was looking at her now, but his expression was unreadable and she didn't know if he was believing her or not. And she felt laid bare. Tears threatened. There were also, shoved into the darkest, furthest part of her mind, speeches she'd composed to say to her father.

"You shouldn't have just up and walked away from your family, you know. My great-grandmother and your son weren't the only people in the world you might've mattered to. There's me, and my sister, and my mother. And just knowing that you're out there when...when..." Oh God, here it came, and she knew she'd come too far now to keep herself from saying it. Inevitably, the first of the tears took advantage of the shudder in her control and slipped down her cheek. "...when I'm going to get married in less than a year and have no one to walk me down the aisle..."

All attempts at further composure shattered under the weight of a hurt she'd only wept over in the privacy of her room.

The unexpected pressure of a thumb and the pad of a palm, warm and conscientiously firm against her cheek, surprised her. Perhaps it was the experienced response of a retired father who had dealt with his share of scraped knees. She couldn't help the blind grab she made for that hand.

His fingers fluttered, startled. But the warm pressure of his hand remained.

The fit only lasted a few moments. As she sat up, wiping away the evidence of her breakdown, she allowed herself the unprepared cowardice of staring at a button on his shirt. "I'm sorry," she apologized thickly. "I didn't mean to accuse you like that. I'm sure I don't know the whole story."

He shifted a little, his expression still inscrutable.

"I'm not here as a reporter," she told him again. "I just wanted to meet you."

The kettle started to whistle. He turned back toward the stove. "I believe you." He clicked off the burner and he began to pour the water.

The tea was warm and calming, but most of her tension had been exorcised in her flurry of weeping. She'd worried about making a fool of herself. What was there to fear now?

"Can I ask why you left after the funeral?" she asked once he'd seated himself again.

He dropped his gaze into his tea, and Trina belatedly realized that the answer was probably not something he could sum up in a single sentence.

"My grandfather always talked about you. He obviously respected you. There are people who would welcome you into their lives, if you offered the opportunity. Like my great-grandmother." She smiled at him, a smile real enough to make her remember those first sparks of affection she'd felt for a grieving man she'd never met. Tifa Lockhart's deathbed letter had painted him so fragile beneath layers and layers of denial and resistance. "Like me."

He continued to stare into his tea. "You sound like her."

Her smile widened; it was quite a compliment. "I should. It's part of what she wrote in a letter I found in the drawer of an old dresser. A letter addressed to you."

He looked up at this. Something flashed across his face, another glimpse of that haunted vulnerability, and then it was gone.

Trina slipped a hand into the inner pocket of her coat. "Here."

It was in an envelope, folded and somewhat battered around the edges. He took it from her slowly, as if he expected it to crumble into dust in his fingers.

"I've wanted to give it to you. I'm not sure if she ever meant for you to find it, or if she just wrote it for herself and then hid it away." She curled her hand around the handle of her mug as he pulled the letter out and began to flatten it on the table. "But it says a lot of things I think she probably wanted you to know."

He glanced at her quickly. "You've read it."

She smiled sheepishly. "Only a couple of hundred times."

One of his eyebrows seemed to stutter in surprise before he turned back to the paper in front of him, preserved through the decades without the yellowing effect of the sun. She reread it along with him in her mind as his eyes followed the unsteady handwriting.

'Vincent,

I know it's hard for you to see me like this, in this bed, when I can hardly speak anymore and my hands are almost too frail to hold this pen. But I'm determined to write this down. I don't think I'll find any peace if I don't express these thoughts.

You've grown so distant lately. You hardly look at me, and you rarely say anything when you talk. I know Jordan is fine and I know Connie had her baby. I've seen little Trina two or three times already, waving and kicking her tiny limbs. I can feel it in my joints when the weather is bad. But how are you? You're hurting so much, knowing that my time is near. You're denying my mortality, even now, and you're preparing yourself by acting as if I were already dead. And I know you're getting ready to run, as soon as I'm gone and your obligation is fulfilled. But Vincent, please, don't run. Don't leave them. You need them. And they need you. They are your family.

You can tell Jordan now, if you like, that he is not your biological son. Though I think he's known it for a long time. You two have never looked anything alike. Though you are so alike in your mannerisms and your sense of humour. He loves you and looks up to you more than anyone else in the world. Stay with him, and grieve with him. It would mean so much to him. He knows you're growing distant and he doesn't know how to stop you. Even I'm not sure, except to beg you to come back to your family. They all love you so much, and I know you'd be delighted playing the grandfather all over again.

You want to deny it, but you need people, Vincent. If you offer them the opportunity, they will let you into their lives and give your life meaning. Give them the chance to understand you. For me. Please. The worst thing I can imagine is having my family broken apart because of my death.

I wish you would talk to me about how you're feeling, so that we can face this together, but I know you won't. I hate being alone right now, afraid and unsettled, but I don't blame you. I never wanted to change you. I just wanted to love you.

And I do love you, with my entire heart. I know, somehow, that we will meet again someday. I'll be waiting for you, like I've always waited.

Tifa'

It was a moment before he folded the letter up again and replaced it in the envelope. And then he sat staring at the table.

Trina allowed him a few moments of reflective silence before breaking the reverie. "She loved you very much."

She thought she saw the fluid twitch of an eyebrow. "She was all of the best parts of this world. When I left, it was to grieve the loss of her."

Trina put her mug down on the table, surprised to hear him speak candidly. She had actually begun to suspect that it was time for her to go and abandon him to his thoughts, give him time to come to a decision by himself.

"And I wanted to be alone."

That was understandable, she thought. "But why didn't you come back? You would have been welcome."

He lifted his mug from the table, though he didn't bring it to his lips. "I wanted to come back, eventually. But by the time I felt ready, ten years had passed and my son was dead. I didn't want to intrude on an established family."

"But it's your family."

He glanced at her and his mouth softened. "Perhaps I'd forgotten."

* * *

He wasn't there, in the end, to walk her down the aisle. Her mother did that. Hugging her arm and sniffling and whispering, "You look so beautiful, honey. So beautiful."

But he was there for a few minutes at the reception. Just to be in attendance for the occasion. Just to let her know that he'd been watching. That he'd seen her. To shake her new husband's hand, and to kiss her upturned cheek, waiting for his great-grandfatherly blessing. To smile at Connie, his granddaughter, and submit to the unexpected embraces of both the mother and the sister of the bride.

And to press a tiny strip of paper into Trina's lace-trimmed hand and whisper as he came in for a departing kiss:

"Call me, when there are grandchildren."


End file.
